We as a society need to save our children from this Government, what is more important to our Government? It certainly isn’t children that are being killed and abused by individuals that should be locked up. Instead the Government is more concerned about targets, it is this government and previous reckless governments that has shut down all resources or funding for these children. OFSTED are have consistently give nothing but good grades on the back of the contents of filing cabinets and graphs created from flawed, indeed, untruthful data. Corruption, deception is all these MP’s know.

Managers in Charge of Social Workers main aim is not to help our children, No it is simple to please OFSTED by meeting recommendations to decrease the numbers of children on the At Risk register, whether those children remain at risk or not, this is totally madness, its not about the protection of children any more, it boils down to funding and damn right false data which lead to deceiving statistics

Government timescales, policies, procedures and guidelines are nothing but a farce they are doctored to meet governments needs only, like I say its not about structure of preventing child abuse, I do not vote and never have, simply due to the fact that I am sick of Governments placing our children in danger.

I am asking everybody to think carefully about the issues of these children, we need a change for the better, the old system scrapped completely, a new new strong structure put in place and views of social workers and professionals on the front line to give major imput into this change, instead of the Government throwing around there weight, we need an independent body to overlook Government policies and procurdues when it comes to children at risk, preferrable a department that cannot be influncled by Government, that would POLICE both OFTED and Government policies.

Its time for Government to stop there decietful ways and knuckle down in protecting and serving our children properly what hell are we paying you for?

I have come across a report by the Children’s Society found that those children who escaped from their captors were often returned to lives of domestic imprisonment and forced to work in brothels or as slaves in British homes. The report also found that children who did leave their guardian’s home were too scared to reveal what was happening to them, or did not realise that they were being abused.

Children kidnapped

The United Kingdom Human Trafficking Centre (UKHTC) knows of 325 children from 52 countries who may have been trafficked into the UK during 2008. The Children’s Society examined 46 cases for the report and found that while more than half of the children attended school while in the UK, workers they came into contact with and asked for help did not know how to refer them. Significantly, even when children are identified as being ‘at risk’ and are taken into care, they are still at risk of kidnapping by traffickers. This year it was discovered that 77 children had gone missing from a children’s home near Heathrow since 2006.

It is estimated that 1.2million children are trafficked worldwide every year.

If your aware of such traffick of children please contact us directly via our email or telephone number.

The Commission of Investigation report into the Catholic Archdiocese of Dublin, known as the Murphy report, was finally published late last year. The commission, established in 2006 by the Irish parliament, was tasked with investigating how numerous allegations of child sex abuse by priests were handled between 1975 and 2004.

Documenting an extended series of abuses, some of which were belatedly tried through the courts, the report makes clear—based on over 100,000 documents—that the church authorities in Dublin, in collusion with the police and state authorities, systematically covered for abusive priests for decades.

The Dublin Archdiocese guaranteed that successive generations of children were exposed to a large number of predatory paedophiles, who were themselves in need of psychiatric treatment. When parents or children complained, their reports were rarely taken seriously, or were ignored. If they were investigated, the outcome remained concealed within church archives while the priests in question were moved to other areas with no restrictions on their activity.

The report has generated immense public outrage. A number of bishops linked in the report to hushing up paedophile cases, who initially refused to resign, have been forced out of office. Father Michael Canny of Derry told the press, “There is no good saying other than the truth. The church…has no credibility, no standing, and no moral authority…confidence in the church has been broken on a fundamental level.”

Less attention has been paid to aspects of the report that shed light on the extent to which the Catholic Church retains a dominant role in the Irish republic. This medieval institution continues to be given unregulated access by the country’s political leaders to the minds and bodies of successive generations of young people. The abusive and criminal practices documented in the report are only the vilest expression of a relationship established between the Irish bourgeoisie and the church in the earliest days of the republic.

For this reason, the report allows an airing of abuses and attributes responsibility to the church and state bodies, but essentially absolves the Irish political system. Its conclusion is that the same state responsible for allowing church abuses to take place in the first place should be entrusted to “ensure that no similar institutional immunity is ever allowed to occur again.”

The commission came about following a 2002 RTE prime time programme “Cardinal Secrets,” which alleged that church and state authorities in Dublin had for decades ignored and suppressed repeated complaints and warnings of endemic sexual abuse of children by priests. Many individuals, including violent child rapists who had repeated allegations against them, were simply transferred to areas unfamiliar with their activities.

While rumours and bitter personal testimonies had been circulating for decades, it was only in the late 1980s that legal cases began to emerge. In 1987 a number of Catholic dioceses took out insurance against allegations of child sex abuse. In 1994 Father Brendan Smyth was sentenced to four years in prison for abusing children in Northern Ireland and a number of individual cases emerged over the 1990s.

In 2002 an inquiry was set up into child abuse in the Ferns diocese in county Wexford. Never officially published, the Ferns report, completed in 2005, noted that bishops in the diocese routinely responded to abuse allegations by treating them purely as a “moral problem” for the priests in question. There were repeated instances of priests being re-allocated to curacies where they would have responsibility for children. Individuals known to have a propensity to abuse children were even inaugurated into the priesthood.

When complaints were made to the Gardai, the Irish police, the Ferns report noted, these were, prior to 1988, not recorded properly—although later complaints were investigated. local health authorities made “no significant response” to abuse allegations.

The Ryan report, published earlier in 2009 by the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse, documented but held nobody accountable for the existence of a horrifying children’s gulag, run by the church from the era of British colonial rule and maintained by the Irish state as a tool of class intimidation and child labour. Every form of physical and sexual abuse was rife in a network of brutal industrial schools, whose functions were integrated into the legal and education system.

Completed in July 2009, the Murphy report was finally cleared for publication by the high court in Dublin last November. Large sections are redacted from the version available for download. The report even now states that it “recognises that the Archdiocese of Dublin and the many religious orders that operate within it have made and continue to make a major contribution to the lives of the citizens of Ireland….”

The report also considers that currently “there are effective structures and procedures in operation.” Its primary concern is merely that these structures are not legally based, being dependent on the current archbishop of Dublin and the director of the Child Protection Service.

There are, nevertheless, many insights.

The report only deals with Dublin, where the archdiocese dominates a city with 1,000,000 Catholics. The archdiocese of Dublin is divided into 200 parishes, within which some 650 priests are currently active. Since 1940, 1,350 priests have been ordained in the city, while an “unquantifiable” number of priests were available for supply work. Currently, the archdiocese runs parishes, provides services to 477 national schools, 189 post-primary schools, prisons, the defence forces and 50 hospitals. Yet, the report makes clear, its legal status is unclear, its finances are unclear and its management structures vague and dependent on the subjective whims of individual archbishops. It answers to the Pope and the Vatican, not the ruling parties in Dublin.

An entire chapter of the report is devoted to “Canon Law”—the Vatican’s own set of arcane and confused internal procedural rules. The report complains that “the fact is that Catholic Church authorities, in dealing with complaints against its clerics, gave primacy to its own laws.” The commission unearthed procedural documents from 1922 and 1962 on the “worst crime,” which made clear that, to the extent that the church took sexual abuse of minors to be a problem, secrecy was the priority.

Anyone making an accusation against a priest was required to swear an oath of secrecy, on penalty of excommunication. The entire process was slanted to ensure silence, to avoid any prejudice to the church’s reputation. To the extent that individual priests were found guilty, the emphasis of the process was to avoid removing them from the priesthood.

Even this secretive framework was set aside. The commission found that the Dublin archdiocese adopted a “pastoral approach”—moral advice to the priests—which was “wholly ineffective as a means of controlling clerical child sexual abuse.”

The commission received reports on 172 named priests and 11 unnamed. Of these it finally investigated complaints concerning over 320 children against a representative sample of 46 priests. The 46 include 11 who have already been convicted of child sex offences.

One example will do. The report mentions a Father James McNamee, as having had 21 complaints against him, dating back to 1950s. Most involved McNamee abusing young boys in the guise of helping them learn to swim. By 1978 he had a private swimming pool to which only young boys were invited. From at least the 1970s, successive bishops and archbishops were aware of McNamee’s predilections.

An internal investigation by another priest, Monsignor O’Regan, warned the presiding archbishop that a “possibly explosive situation exists locally, which could be very scandalous indeed.” In 1979, however, McNamee was transferred to a Carmelite monastery in Delgany for “health reasons.”

The report notes that “the emphasis was on the avoidance of scandal and the protection of the priest’s reputation rather than the protection of children.”

This was a general pattern. “The Dublin Archdiocese’s preoccupations in dealing with cases of child sexual abuse, at least until the mid 1990s, were the maintenance of secrecy, the avoidance of scandal, the protection of the reputation of the Church, and the preservation of its assets.”

In this, the church was assisted by a police force that essentially agreed that the church was above the law. “A number of very senior members of the Gardai, including the commissioner in 1960, clearly regarded priests as being outside their remit. There are some examples of Gardai actually reporting complaints to the archdiocese instead of investigating them.”

The report is similarly critical of the health authorities, particularly the Health and Safety Executive, which appears to have had little role in even recording cases of clerical abuse. When it did so, no effort was made to chart potential abusers, and they had no powers to intervene on behalf of potential victims.

Political response to the report has been very limited, beyond expressions of outrage. One incident however, was revealing.

The Vatican was contacted by the commission in 2006 requesting documents on procedure and reports relayed from Dublin to Rome in the period covered by the investigation. Rome did not reply and then contacted the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs to complain the requests had not gone through the proper channels. A similar request was twice forwarded to the papal nuncio—the Vatican’s envoy—in Ireland, Archbishop Giuseppe Leanza, who also refused to reply.

Irish Taoiseach (prime minister) Brian Cowen defended the Vatican’s dealings with the Murphy commission. According to Cowen, “My belief is that the commission and the Holy See appear to have acted in good faith in this matter even if the best outcome was not achieved.”

For its part, the Vatican responded to the commission report with a statement of “profound regret,” precisely 420 words in length.

I have so many people asked me which is the main charities that I support whole heartily and which charity that would I recommend to donate too, well there is so many that I love, The ones I have the utmost respect for are:-

Click the banners to donate; they are my first charity that is my top 3. They do not discriminate and pick the children they want or do not want to help like some well known large charities that are known to all of us. They also recently are discussing proposals to take there age limit to 21. This has won the heart of Joe Peters. Please donate on my behalf to Barnardos Please. (In my eyes they do there utmost best and I am truly have a soft place in my heart for them).

Another lovely charity that I hold in high regards, you will find this charity printed in my second book “Cry Myself to Sleep” NAPAC is the National Association for People Abused in Childhood. We are a registered charity, based in the UK, providing support and information for people abused in childhood. If you were abused as a child and are looking for support click here. Or Freephone 0800 085 3330

Counselling Services for Children in Wales (Please Click Logo to Donate)

New Pathways was established in 1993 to provide a helpline for victims of rape. We now provide an all embracing, sympathetic, caring and worthwhile service to all victims of rape, sexual abuse and trauma. We provide bespoke and relevant counselling services, help and advice to children, young people and adults who have suffered rape, sexual abuse or trauma. Our services, which are provided free of charge, are used by clients throughout Wales

Help us be there for as long as it takes

We believe no child should be neglected; please donate today to help support our work

The number of child sex abuse websites in Europe has soared and the violence shown has become more extreme, the European commission and Europol, the European police agency, warned yesterday.

Jacques Barrot, EU commissioner for freedom, justice and security said Europe was facing “an extremely dramatic situation” after the number of child abuse websites increased fourfold between 2004 and 2007. At the launch of an international coalition to disrupt finances of the online child sex trade, he warned that organised criminal gangs were making an “indecent profit” for “horrific crimes against the most vulnerable people - children”.

British police who tackle online child abuse and will lead the work of the European Financial Coalition said that up to 300 commercial child abuse websites were available at any one time and earnt well in excess of €30m (£26.8m) a year. Officers at the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (Ceop) in London processed 1.6m images in the past year alone and identified and rescued 50 children.

“The ages of the victims are getting lower and lower and the degree of depravity is getting higher and higher,” said Francis Herbert, secretary general of Missing Children Europe, which is part of the coalition. The Internet Watch Foundation has found that 10% of the children featuring in images of abuse are under two, a third are younger than six and 80% are under 10.

“The recent trend has been for more brutal images and severe torture of children,” said Torbjorn Ull, a detective in Europol’s serious crime department in Brussels. “If there is a demand for images of penetration or torture then they will produce it to order.” Some images appeared to include killings, though it has been impossible for officers to verify.

The European commission yesterday announced a €17m investment in the “fight against the production, distribution and sale of child abuse images” and will set up a European alert system which will gather together all police reports of online abuse which will be crosschecked by Europol to provide evidence against the abusers and the criminal groups profiting from abuse.

The financial coalition includes Paypal, Visa, Mastercard, eBay and Microsoft, which are all involved in online payments. But Jim Gamble, chief executive of Ceop, said the involvement of organised criminals had diminished and he wants the coalition to help tackle file-sharing sites operated not by gangsters but by paedophiles who are motivated by their desires rather than profit.

“The organised crime element has diminished year on year as the risk increased and the profit reduced. Now we plan to eradicate the remnants of that industry once and for all,” he said.

He said the number of non-profit sites had overtaken the number of pay-per-view sites and the financial coalition will attempt to follow the trails of money in these groups in the same way as counter-terror police investigate terror finance.

“These groups have more in common with terrorists who are driven by inherent belief rather than profit,” he said.

When I was a child, the NSPCC had such a positive image. It was the guardian angel of abused children, propounder of such a laudible aim as saving them from injury and distress. There was no reason to question the existence or activities of such a body: it was accepted that they were the good guys. But in preparation for this three-part series of posts, Tech (my co-author on this project) and I have been doing a lot of reading about the NSPCC and have discovered completely changed situation. So, what went wrong? In the next three posts, we’ll try to find out: starting here and now, with a close look at its recent involvement with home educators; we’ll then pan out tomorrow to consider the wider picture; and culminate in the third post with an evaluation of its effects on children.

The first we knew of the NSPCC’s opinions of Home Education appeared in the initial DCSF press release about the Home Education review on January 19th this year, in which:

Head of policy and public affairs at the NSPCC, Diana Sutton, said:

“We welcome the Government’s decision to review the guidance on home education. We believe the existing legislation and guidance on elective home education is outdated. We support the view set out by the London (LA) Children’s Safeguarding Leads network that the government should review the legislation to balance the parents’ rights to home educate their children, the local authorities’ duty to safeguard children and the child’s right to protection. We welcome the fact that this review will look at where local authorities have concerns about the safety and welfare, or education, of a home educated child and what systems are in place to deal with those concerns.”

This was followed the very next day by the appearance on Radio 2’s Jeremy Vine show of Vijay Patel, the NSPCC’s Child Protection Policy Advisor who admitted, when asked about statistical evidence of child abuse in elective home education, that: “We.. the inf.. We don’t have the evidence there statistically, no.”

Home educators were stunned by the slur, especially given that there was no logical reason to associate elective home education with child abuse. We started to wonder about the motives behind it, which I think was the first time many of us had ever had cause to question the NSPCC’s motives about anything.

Despite the outcry, Mr Patel then compounded the insult in an interview with the Independent by implying that Victoria Climbie had been home educated: “Some people use home education to hide. Look at the Victoria Climbié case. No one asked where she was at school. We have no view about home education, but we do know that to find out about abuse someone has to know about the child.”

The home education movement’s response now quickly moved from shock to anger. The pressure group AHEd wrote to the NSPCC, objecting “in the strongest terms possible to these comments. It is our view,” the letter continued, “That the comments demonstrate a clear prejudice against home educators and a deliberate attempt to implicate home education with false evidence and scandal in order to prejudice the outcome of the government Review into Home Education.”

Some bloggers, like Mum6kids, called for Mr Patel to be sacked. Others, like Pete Darby, wrote powerful letters to the Independent in complaint: “Vijay Patel is robbing the grave of a child that the NSPCC failed to save. He is doing this in order to make a grab for power for his organisation in an attack on a minority group, a group for which there is no evidence of a problem concerning child abuse or neglect.”

The political party UKIP even joined in with the call for Mr Patel to be sacked, and other blogs such as Children Are People asked for a full retraction of the comments, at least. Working Dad at Panoptican said: “The NSPCC’s message has to be ‘children are at risk’. To put it at its baldest, the NSPCC needs cruelty to children to be seen to occur because, without that, it has no raison d’etre,” and Firebird said that the NSPCC “Should be ashamed of themselves.” *Headdesk* found it “..fairly disgusting that the leadership of a charity that should be beyond reproach should be so ill-informed and in the position of being able to cause so much damage to home educating children and their families.”

Jem Dowse, at Doing it our way wrote to his MP, including the sentiment: “For Mr. Patel to use this tragic case to further his agenda against the legal rights of parents to educate their children at home is abusive and extraordinarily disrespectful to the memory of that murdered child. This is emphatically not something that I would expect from a senior person in an organisation that exists to promote child welfare.” Lotusbirther questioned the charity’s independent status and Maire in Staffordshire commented that, “In order to extend its remit, possibly to get more money from the government or at least keep what it has, [the NSPCC's] policy adviser Mr Vijay Patel is shamelessly spreading false rumour in support of the government’s spurious review into the possibility of home education being a hot bed of child abuse.” Even the Victoria Climbié Foundation became involved, as reported by Carlotta at Dare to Know, saying: “The Victoria Climbié Foundation UK is genuinely concerned about the link being made between Victoria Climbié and home education, and Victoria as a hidden child. Victoria was neither home-educated nor hidden.”.

But it was on Facebook that the reaction was perhaps most vehemently expressed. A viral campaign developed on the NSPCC’s page there, with many home educators’ messages now having been mysteriously removed. Eventually, the charity was forced to respond as follows:

The NSPCC would like to clarify its position regarding home education. The statement issued by the NSPCC when the review of home education was announced made iit clear that the NSPCC wishes the review to balance parents’ rights to home educate their children with the local authorities’ duty to safeguard children and the child’s right to protection. We sincerely regret any misunderstanding caused by the quote attributed to Vijay Patel in the Independent. The reference to Victoria Climbie was meant to illustrate the point that she was killed at home out of sight of the authorities. It was not intended to imply that Victoria was educated at home or that home education was in any way connected to what happened to her. We are writing to the Independent to clarify our position on this important point. Thank you.

- but many remained unsatisfied.

One home educating mother, Sarita, managed to secure an interview with Mr Patel, which - like the rest of the links in this post - really needs to be followed and read in full, to get the proper context. It’s this interview that I satirised in my cartoon at the top of my post. Apologies to Sarita - I’m no Da Vinci and I probably didn’t do the back of your head justice, but having never seen it, I can perhaps be forgiven. The following excerpts are taken from Sarita’s immediate and detailed recollections of the meeting and may not, therefore, be definitive quotes of what was actually said.

During his meeting with Sarita, Vijay Patel stated again that “the NSPCC do not have any specific research or evidence linking home education to child abuse or neglect.”

Sarita “asked him why he would - after all the complaints he received in January - do it again last week in the Independent. What was he thinking? He tried to say it was taken out of context but admits to the harm that it caused. I did say that it was unacceptable that a person used to talking to the press and knowing from experience how they work could not take sufficent care in ensuring it didn’t happen again. I said he and the NSPCC have to rectify the image of home education that they have created. I asked him if when he met with Baroness Morgan, this was an intended campaign. I asked him how he could say these things without evidence. He couldn’t really respond. I told him he needs to apologise publicly and make good the damage he has caused. He said that he couldn’t do it publicly. He did say that there would not be any more cases quoted in the press with respect to home education.”

- which was, in my opinion, a crucial point that he didn’t really answer satisfatorily on that occasion, though I suspect his earlier half-question to her:

“So what about an independent agency that home educators could access…”

- spoke volumes, by way of a possible explanation. Has the NSPCC been promised the contract on elective home education, if they manage to publicly generate some kind of justification for one, on the back of the DCSF review? It certainly looks, from the orchestrated nature of the attacks, as if some collaboration has been going on behind the scenes.

Sarita said: “We then came back to the issue of public perception of home ed, the general feeling of measurement and monitoring needing to be compulsory, but mostly that home ed children could not be deemed safe in a way that school children are. By this stage, I felt he had grasped the major points of our arguments and I asked him again about the perception that he and the NSPCC were fuelling with regard to home education and child protection. I asked why he thought it appropriate that even without evidence he could talk about home education and give the impression that he knew what he was talking about? I asked him whether after listening to what I had to say, he felt that a public apology should be forthcoming. I said that the NSPCC now had an obligation to protect children who were home educated from being branded as being abused. He said he could not commit to me that he will make a public apology and put right what he has done, but he said that given that he understood more about the issues that he would talk to his managers about it.”

- and the NSPCC appears to be using its lawyers to talk to the press now, instead of Mr Patel, which leaves us all wondering what his instructions were and to what extent - if any - he breached them in those two interviews. Shockingly, in his meeting with Sarita, he admitted that the NSPCC “had no real knowledge of home education other than information they had gained from LAs and LA responses to previous guidance,” and, perhaps even more alarmingly, “He said he wasn’t familiar with the ins and outs of ECM!”

Sarita’s gut reaction was that Mr Patel was telling the truth in her meeting with him, but if so, it’s astounding that the government can be working hand-in-glove with such a careless, ill-informed organisation. To give power to such people over children’s lives is surely a highly dangerous strategy.

The spotlight is now on the NSPCC and many of us have been investigating the charity’s other activities over the years - as well as its business connections - as a result of the events set out above to see whether home educators have been the only minority to group to be picked on by the organisation in this way.

Anti Family?

I’ve just caught up with cross-referencing the posts on my blog and it occurred to me that perhaps the NSPCC warranted its own drop-down menu in the sidebar, because I’d surely written two or three posts about them now. When the job got underway, I was amazed to find that I’ve written nine NSPCC-related posts. Or actually ten, including this one. Now why would a home education blog warrant as many as ten posts about the NSPCC, an organisation that’s supposed to prevent cruelty to children? Something’s badly wrong there, isn’t it? That jars in the logic part of my brain, causing a traffic pile up and setting off all the sirens. It’s not right.

So, today’s post is about looking at the wider picture. On Friday we ascertained (as if we didn’t know before) that the NSPCC has recently been running a vendetta against elective home educators, for reasons best known to itself but possibly suggested at in that little cartoon there. (I did think about doing another one of those today, but my artistic bravado has left me now.) Today I’m going to make some attempt to pull together all the reams of information I’ve been given about the NSPCC’s other questionable antics, the idea being to try to find out whether it’s just picking on us out of the blue, or whether this is its normal modus operandi. And if it is the latter - why?

Once I’d got over being bewildered about the NSPCC repeatedly suggesting home educators might be child abusers, the next thing that raised NSPCC-related alarm bells with me was when AHEd was writing its letter to their Chief Executive. Barbara (Chair of AHEd) asked onlist for someone to find out who that was, so I googled ‘NSPCC Chief Executive’, expecting to find a long list of pages about someone who’d spent his or her life devoted to the issue of child protection. Instead, I found this:

The article states:

Andrew Flanagan, who takes over from Mary Marsh in January, was chief executive of Scotland’s biggest media firm, STV (previously SMG), for 10 years until he resigned in 2006. … He left SMG in the wake of shareholder pressure and subsequently took up the post of chair at Heritage House, a private publishing investment company. He has also worked for PA Consulting, the IT and telecoms company Nynex, and PricewaterhouseCoopers.

and:

A spokesman for the NSPCC says that while Flanagan has no track record in the voluntary sector, his “experience of leading large-scale organisations through growth and change” will be a valuable addition to the organisation.

“No track record in the voluntary sector..”??? Why does a children’s charity need a media man for its Chief Executive? What does a media man know about the needs of children? This information in itself, coupled with the bizarre and apparently out-of-the-blue attack on home educators, made me start to think that things are not what they seem to be, with this organisation. And that maybe.. things are not what they should be.

It doesn’t feel good to dig deeper. Believe it or not, digging the dirt on people and organisations is not my thing. Taking care of my children, my house and my land is my thing but when something threatens my freedom to do that, action must be taken. The first time I became aware that anything might ever have the power to threaten that, was around the time of the South Ronaldsay child abuse scandal of 1991, when:

social workers and police removed nine children belonging to four families from their homes on the remote Orkney, Scotland island South Ronaldsay in dawn raids, following suspicions of ritualistic Satanic child abuse. The nine children were placed into foster homes and barred from any contact from their parents. During lengthy interviews the nine children denied that any abuse had occurred, and medical examinations did not reveal any evidence of abuse.

In 1991 I was just starting my family, with sons of one and two years old, and the thought that someone had the power to come and forcibly remove them from me on the strength of rumour and hearsay, as had happened to the Orkney parents, was terrifying.

There were similar cases around the same time in Rochdale and Nottingham, and the culmination of the three generated a deep mistrust of social workers and a fundamental feeling of family insecurity in myself other young parents I knew at the time. Those cases didn’t just do damage to the victims involved: they damaged society for everyone else in a way that’s hard to explain now, nearly twenty years later.

So in researching the NSPCC for this series, I was horrified to discover their part in those terrible witch hunts. From this site:

We kept up detailed correspondence with Dr Alan Gilmour, director of the NSPCC, providing him with statistical information and background data about occultism in the U.K. well before their public support of the satanic abuse myth. Whilst engaged in correspondence with the NSPCC they, without warning, published a critical and sensational press-release supporting the idea of satanic child sexual abuse. The NSPCC did this without ever once asking to see our documented evidence to the contrary. When we sent them a dossier, containing suspicious background on people and groups from whom they had been accepting ‘evidence’ they ignored the dossier entirely and when we persisted the NSPCC took legal advice and subsequently refused to comment on our evidence. The NSPCC never once telephoned or visited us to review our evidence. They knew that had they done so, they would have had to retract publicly and admit a mistake over a pronouncement which they were already incorporating into a fundraising appeal. Instead they sent a questionnaire to their branches asking their inspectors if they believed that satanic abuse existed. It was this unethical and unprofessional ‘research’ that prompted the public statements in their annual report in which the NSPCC said that they had ‘evidence’ of satanic child abuse occurring. Upon sight of this we immediately prepared a condemnatory press-release showing the NSPCC’S inaccuracies. We sent this to the influential people on various NSPCC standing committees, including Princess Margaret, The Queen Mother; Various Bishops and others. We asked SOMEONE to telephone or write to us BUT NOT ONE DID. We then mailed out the same press release to our general mailing file (all MPs; Newspaper Editors and Police & Social Services). We got only ONE reply, a courageous journalist from the London WEEKENDER Magazine who contacted the NSPCC. A spokesperson for the NSPCC backtracked immediately and blamed the sensational publicity on the media response, denying that the NSPCC had said that satanic child abuse existed. When we wrote to the NSPCC and asked them to issue a press release to the effect that their stance on satanic child abuse had been misinterpreted by the media the NSPCC point blank refused. “It is not for the society to comment upon statements published in the popular press”. The NSPCC were basically saying that even if their dishonourable handling of the situation had resulted in a jeopardising of religious freedom or victimisation of innocent occultists it was not in their interests to put the matter right under the hysteria which reigned. [My italics]

I don’t know if that sounds at all familiar to anyone, but in the first part of this series on Friday, we saw a similar array of half-apologies and half-retractions from the NSPCC regarding its vilification of home educators - but the same fundamental refusal to make any effort to publicly correct the eroneous message it had put out.

The problem is, people assume (like I did) that the NSPCC is a reputable group of child abuse experts and not a mob of professional fundraisers and media men who are actually running it as a very profitable business. A good business creates its own markets, everyone knows that. But if everyone knew that the NSPCC appears to fall into that bracket, they would all cancel their Standing Orders and Direct Debits to the organisation. I know of quite a few home educators who already have.

So, what has the NSPCC been doing between Orkney and the campaign against home education? Demonising men, according to Angry Harry, who wrote the following in 2004:

The National Society For The Prevention Of Cruelty To Children in the UK spends millions of pounds every year manufacturing advertisements and propaganda which portray men and fathers as paedophiles and child abusers. These portrayals are displayed all over the country - on TV, in the radio, in the newspapers and on posters. The idea behind them is to induce the public and businesses to donate money to the NSPCC so that its staff can help to protect children from these allegedly-abusive men. Indeed, their campaigns have been so successful that the NSPCC rakes in about £100 million per year in donations. However, in my view, the NSPCC has done a great deal of damage to our society. Indeed, my belief is that it has inflicted far more damage and harm on to the nation’s children than all the paedophiles and child abusers put together. What follows demonstrates that the NSPCC has damaged everyone - including all our children.

- and he proceeds to demonstrate exactly how, with such eloquence that I’m not even going to try to reproduce it here.

So in its pursuit of funding and prominence amongst children’s charities, the NSPCC has so far turned against pagans, fathers and home educators, causing untold damage along the way. Who’s next? The Internet, according to The Devil’s Kitchen in this scathing piece which includes:

The NSPCC, it may be remembered, had been pretty vocal in helping stir up the, quite literal, witch-hunt. Since, at the time, I regularly contributed to the NSPCC, I thought I’d drop them a line asking why they’d been using my money to such mischievous effect. This was, I recall noting to them, particularly galling at a time when systematic abuse in various children’s homes was coming to light. It was, I reasoned, inconceivable that the NSPCC hadn’t received complaints from any of the children on the receiving end of this abuse, so how come they were apparently ignoring actual abuse and, instead, starting up wild-goose chases to disastrous effect?

The reply I received was so breath-taking in its cynicism that it shook even me. Yes, apparently they’d had their doubts about this ritual abuse malarkey but I had to realise that they did an awful lot of very necessary work for children, this costs money, and tabloid bandwagons are a very good way of raising much-needed funds. They rather ducked the question about why they’d failed to spot what was going on in various children’s homes over the years, and hoped they could count on my continued support. [Again, my italics.]

In its campaign against Internet freedom, the NSPCC is working with Becta, our Mr Badman’s new employers. (See the editorial down the left hand side of this page [opens pdf].)

Also, as pointed out by Elaine, next in the NSPCC tabloid child abuse bandwagon queue might be, according to their latest publications, women. Put it all together, and you have the blanket assumption (paranoia?) that parents aren’t safe and homes aren’t safe, but of course schools are, and anyone who’s been CRB-checked is. Except - we know that’s not true, don’t we?

I think it’s safe to summarise today that the NSPCC’s recent treatment of home educators was nothing personal: it is its modus operandi. In the third and final part of this series, we’re going to look at some research Tech has been doing, amongst other things, to try to ascertain whether all of this child protection hype actually does make children safer - or more vulnerable.

Anti-Child

Last Friday, we began our three-part series on the NSPCC with an analytical overview of that organisation’s involvement in the government’s Independent review of home education and the reaction of home educators. Then on Sunday, we looked further back in the NSPCC’s history to find out whether we were the only section of society to have been subjected to this kind of treatment by them, and learned that we were not. In fact, the NSPCC seems to have made an art form over the years of using “tabloid bandwagons [as] a very good way of raising much-needed funds”.

So today we’re finishing the trilogy with an investigation into the actual effects of the child protection culture. We’re going to try to work out whether people think children are safer, as a result of it, or in fact more vulnerable.

Before I go on, I’d like to thank everyone who has provided information and encouragement for this series - especially my series co-author Tech, who has ordered books and searched tirelessly for quotes and contexts for me to string together. But other people have been generous too: I printed it all out and have been carrying a thick wodge of NSPCC-based text around with me all week, to which I just hope I can do justice. I probably won’t manage to cover absolutely anything: if you notice anything missing, please feel free to add it in the comments section.

We’ll start with this article by Jay Rayner from the Guardian archives:

The article quotes June McKerrow, director of the Mental Health Foundation which has conducted research on children’s well-being:

“We do not need any more of these messages. If anything, the whole thing has already been taken too far.”

- and it neatly sums up our own conclusion from part 2:

To put it at its baldest, the NSPCC needs cruelty to children to be seen to occur because, without that, it has no raison d’etre.

But the key point of the piece I think is this paragraph:

Of more concern to experts is what impact the NSPCC’s constant stream of warnings will have upon child development. Raising children to be fully rounded individuals is about teaching them to deal with risk for themselves. When is it safe to take the stabilisers off the bike? When is it safe to let them play in the park alone? If the NSPCC’s warnings delay that process it can only be detrimental. Professor [Colin] Pritchard, [a professor of psychiatric social work at the University of Southampton who has been researching child murders for 10 years] is prepared to go further. ‘While 50 children are murdered each year over 250 are killed in motor accidents,’ he says. ‘If, as a result of the NSPCC advice, more children ride in cars because their parents won’t allow them to walk on the streets then statistically more children will end up being killed in car crashes.’

A few years later in the Guardian again, Patrick Butler in an article called: Full stop missing on child abuse:

analyses a report published by the New Philanthropy Capital (NPC) called Not Seen and Not Heard: Child Abuse - A Guide for Donors and Funders by Emilie Goodall and Tristan Lumley, which contains, he says:

an intriguing and potentially explosive challenge to .. the NSPCC’s Full Stop campaign.

While it doesn’t go so far as to say, like the earlier article, that the campaign actually makes children more vulnerable, it does say:

Campaigning to change public attitudes and keep abuse on the radar, as NSPCC does with some success, has its place, but there is zero evidence that this leads to fewer beatings.

And now I want to talk about Frank Furedi.

- Professor of Sociology at University of Kent, and author of the two books that Tech’s been reviewing: Licensed to Hug: How Child Protection Policies Are Poisoning the Relationship Between the Generations and Damaging the Voluntary Sector (co-written with Jennie Bristow) and Paranoid Parenting: Why Ignoring the Experts May Be Best for Your Child, amongst others.

As well as those, he wrote this article for Spiked: ‘A danger to the nation’s children’, in which he explains how The NSPCC’s campaigns could poison family relations. First, he covers the ground we covered last Sunday:

In recent decades the NSPCC has become a lobby group devoted to publicising its peculiar brand of anti-parent propaganda and promoting itself.

But here’s where he hits the nail right on the head, in my opinion:

There is nothing particularly novel about childhood insecurity; what is new is the attempt to turn it into a disease and a social problem. What is also new is the mendacious project of turning childhood anxiety into a justification for the predatory activity of a publicity-hungry media machine. Even worse is the message transmitted by this campaign - that the NSPCC understands children far better than their mums and dads do.

And:

The implication that parenting under pressure is an invitation to abuse is an insult to the integrity of millions of hardworking mums and dads. It also helps to create a poisonous atmosphere of suspicion and mistrust.

And he so eloquently describes here the problem that’s been chewing away at me for the past few weeks, while I’ve been thinking about all of these campaigns:

The problem with targeting children in this way is that it distracts youngsters from working out ways of communicating problems to family members and friends. It encourages the belief that problems are something you take to a professional or disclose to an NSPCC helpline rather than share with people you know. For children, communicating problems is difficult at the best of times; displacing parents with the NSPCC will only make it more difficult to develop an intergenerational dialogue. Its effect will be to disconnect children from their parents.

Can this be an accident? Can the policy-makers be unaware of this effect? Hmmm. I don’t think so.

I’m quite keen to get hold of some of this man’s books myself now, but luckily Tech has done this already, and pulled out the following relevant quotes:

From Licensed to Hug: How Child Protection Policies Are Poisoning the Relationship Between the Generations and Damaging the Voluntary Sector, by Frank Furedi and Jennie Bristow:

(Amazon product description: “Since the establishment of the Criminal Records Bureau in 2002, more than a third of British adults have had to get a certificate to say they are safe to be near children, and the numbers affected are increasing. Frank Furedi and Jennie Bristow argue that the growth of police vetting has created a sense of mistrust. Communities are forged through the joint commitment of adults to the socialisation of children. Now, adults are afraid to interact with any child not their own. The generations are becoming distant, as adults suspect each other and children are taught to suspect adults. The vetting culture encourages risk aversion: there is a feeling that it is better to ignore young people, even if they are behaving in an anti-social manner, and even if they are in trouble and need help, rather than risk accusations of improper conduct.Vetting also gives a false sense of security as it can only identify those who have offended in the past and been caught - not what people will do after they are passed as fit to be near children. “Licensed to Hug” argues for a more common-sense approach to adult/child relations, based on the assumption that the vast majority of adults can be relied on to help and support children, and that the healthy interaction between generations enriches children’s lives.”)

“Piper and Stronach call for ‘a more ethical practice’:

… one that encourages professionals not to slavishly follow ‘no touch’ guidelines, but to put touch back into context (ie relationships), and take account of trust and friendships. It is argued that we need to think through notions of ‘free touch’ just as much as we would ‘free speech’. This is no call for license, but it is a call for recognition that any system that prioritises bureaucratic constraint over ‘freedom’ introduces a regime of unfreedoms that then develop - through a series of ‘ratchet effects’ - a kind of creeping totalitarianism, not to mention a galloping fatuity.”

Piper, H. and Stronach, I., Don’t Touch! The educational story of a panic, London: Routledge, in press (2008)

“The policy of attempting to prevent paedophiles from getting in contact with children through a mass system of vetting may well unintentionally make the situation more complicated. One regrettable outcome of such policies is to estrange children from all adults - the very people who are likely to protect them from paedophiles and other dangers they may face. The adult qualities of spontaneous compassion and commitment are, we argue, far more effective safeguarding methods than pieces of paper that promote the messages ‘Keep Out’ and ‘Watch Your Back’.”

“During the course of our discussion it became evident that the application of formal procedures to the conduct of human relations threatens to deskill adults. Many adults often feel at a loss about how they should relate to youngsters who are not their children. When formal rules replace the exercise of compassion and initiative, adults become discouraged from developing the kind of skills that help them to relate, interact and socialise with children.”

“Individuals who talked to us about the ‘hassle of paperwork’ also hinted that they were not sure that working with kids was’worth the effort’. And if adults are not to be trusted to be near children, is it any surprise that at least some of them draw the conclusion that they really are not expected to take responsibility for the well-being of children in their community?”

“Alongside the growing policy concern about the impact excessive risk-aversion on childhood experience, there is now an increasing realisation that an obsessive focus on risk and procedure can actually make society more dangerous. When adults become paralysed by the injunction to follow rules at the expense of their instincts, tragic consequences may follow.”
[News stories about The coastguard who saved a girl twice quitting over a health and safety row and Abby Rae, a two-year old who went missing from nursery and was later found dead in a pond are cited at this point.]

“This disturbing story, of a child disappearing because the adult who saw her thought twice and chose to cover his back rather than help her out, has attained the status of an urban myth, and is used as the backdrop to discussions about whether you might help a child climb down from a climbing frame, whether you would intervene in a nasty fight between children, whether you would help a child find her way home, whether you would pick up and cuddle a toddler who had fallen over, whether you would administer first aid on a child you did not know in a public playground if you did not hold a certificate…”

“People worry about these things because of the sense that ‘everyone knows’ that it is right to help and comfort a lost, hurt, or frightened child - but at the same time, ‘in this day and age’, to do so is foolhardy. Thus a human response that was once spontaneous has been interupted by warning bells, making people think twice about something that, in the recent past, they would simply have done.”

“The principle outcome of these trends for intergenerational relations is not simply an aversion to risk but to responsibility. Adults who used to absorb some of the risks faced by children are often not inclined to continue to do so, in case their behaviour is misinterpreted. Is it any surprise that there is now a generation of adults who have aquired the habit of distancing themselves from children and young people? From their perspective, intergenerational relations are experienced as an inconvenience from which they would rather be exempt. Even professionals who work with children are under pressure to avoid taking responsibility. Their career depends more on ticking the right boxes than exercising professional judgement.”

There’s much more, but for brevity and etiquette’s sake I’ve got to stop quoting from that book. The problem is that I can’t paraphrase what he’s saying, without diluting it beyond meaning. We need to all go and buy it! Tech says this quote from Child Protection expert Eileen Munro in the executive summary sums up the whole issue:

“In October 2007, a survey by Scotland’s Commissioner for Children and Young People found that 48% of adults said fear of being falsely accused of causing harm was a barrier to contact with children and young people, and that this would make them less likely to help when they saw a young person in danger or distress.”

And finally, a few excerpts from Paranoid Parenting: Why Ignoring the Experts May Be Best for Your Child, again by Frank Furedi:

“Fear of adults victimising children is fueled by a child-protection industry obsessed with the issue of abuse.”

“The depreciation of adulthood coincides with the idealisation of childhood and childishness, positing adults as morally inferior. In a secular variant of the religious theme fo humanity’s fall from grace, innocent children are said to be ruined by toxic parents in a toxic society. Campaigners promoting the idea of stranger danger contribute to a climate where the stranger - that is, the vast majority of adults inhabiting this planet - is not worthy of a child’s trust.”

“The term *support* is often a euphemism for prescriptive advice about how parents should behave. Parenting education is primarily oriented toward altering adult behaviour and providing mothers and fathers with skills they allegedly lack. Unfortunately, projects that aim to transform incompetent adults into skilled parents tend to disempower mothers and fathers and empower professionals.”

After reading all that, I’m fairly convinced of the argument that the child protection hype does nothing to help children be safer and actually does quite a lot to make them more vulnerable and isolated. So why doesn’t the government listen to real experts like Frank Furedi, instead of just throwing more taxpayers’ money at the NSPCC? And why is the NSPCC still in a position that enables it to repeatedly pick off target groups in its media campaigns, which - at least in the case of this review - seems to conveniently fit with the direction of government policy? We can only assume that they must work hand in glove, but I’d love to know more about this relationship and the meetings that take place between government and this so-called charity and I might do some more digging at a later date about that.

Meanwhile, I have Becta in my sights, as well as the omnipresent Capita, though I’m aware that others are miles ahead of me on this already. I’ll be standing on the shoulders of giants, then. But first, it seems, something called The Tasmanian Model. Deep sigh.

Thank you for your email. If you have any complaints about the NSPCC we would advise you to write to us so that we can try and address them.

It is untrue to say the NSPCC spends any money on first class travel. We have a strict policy on not doing so, unless, as sometimes occurs, first class travel actually works out cheaper. The NSPCC no longer provides company cars although there are 20 in use. It is untrue to state that millions have been spent on first class travel, executive company cars and functions. What functions we do have are often paid for by corporate sponsors and are intended to raise funds for our work preventing cruelty to children.

We hope that this assures you that our priority is and always will be preventing cruelty to children.

Do you think that public donation should have ever been spent on company cars?? Whether they are replacing them or not, they should get rid of them now and put the money back into the funds, and I am sorry to say, that no one should get paid high salaries to run a charity, its morally wrong and disgraceful, so the next time you decide to donate to charities like this one!!

Remember this!! Are you happy that they have spend money in past on company cars and still running them? Do you also agree what this duty enquiries officers email states, that first class travel works out cheaper than second class travel? Have I missed something here?

Millions or Billions of pounds ploughed into the NSPCC? Are we getting value for money, I would love to hear your views about this charity.

If this is any doubt why so many journalists slate people like Joe from telling his abusive childhood story, then we will show you why these memoirs are so important and why they should be told, there are some important testaments of readers that Joe has inspired to get help and even change young lives!! Here what its all about and for those stuck up journalists to take note and educate themselves on child abuse instead of slating survivors of child abuse.

Dear Joe,

1.

Hi Just finished your book cry myself to sleep.
I also had a very abusive childhood being abused by 2 different men one a salvation army guy and the other a step father the salvation army guy is dead but my step father is still alive I’m now 48 years old and I still want answers I want to confront him and ask him why, I’m also considering involving the police.
I was also beaten as a child and forced to do things like eat my own vomit.
As a result I became a very violent person always fighting sometimes with the police.
I did actually have a very stable part in my life as an ambulance man a job that I held down for 12 years but that ended when I broke a policeman’s nose.

I’m now married for the 3rd time to a woman who was also abused by her step father.
Your books have inspired me to do something about the abuse I suffered.
Thank you Robert

2.

Hey;
Im 16 and i finished reading your book “Cry Silent Tears” about a week ago
i used to think my life was hard but after reading your book it made me realise that my life is pretty amazing compared to what you have been through. To my mum slapping me lightly and sending me to my room or taking my phone/laptop away was the end of the world, and i even considered ringing a child line after she hit me once. But i know im only 16 and it may seem pretty sad me saying this but i would have never been able to go through with what you did, I actually cried reading it, its hard to believe that things like that are actually happening behind closed doors. I sort of have a understanding as my mum works for the NSPCC and she deals with things like that, but nothing half as bad as what you went through, I’m sorry but i really can not get over that fact that its true, its hard to believe it. basically i wanted to thank you for writing the book as it has totally changed my outlook in life, i now respect my mum more and reading the book has made me understand that before i was totally oblivious to everyone else’s hurt and pain, assuming that everyone else’s life was as easy, or as i thought at the time, hard, as mine. Sorry but i thought i would write a letter to tell you how i felt about the book; although I’m not very good at writing, or spelling for that matter,
anyways sorry about the long pointless letter.

Leanne; x

­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­3.

I have finished reading ‘Crying Silent Tears’ and I have never cried over a book before. It is shocking that you had to be treated that way and lost so many peoples trust. I am 12 years old and when I grow up I want to help kids like you were. No one should have been treated the way you were treated. I am glad that you eventually had a happy ending and that you now have kids of your own. I also find it amazing that you now help kids today. You are my role model and I hope that you get this message.Thanks very much
Jamie

4.

Hello Dear Brave Joe. How have you been? I am reading at the moment “Cry Myself To Sleep”, How much pain, how difficult is even to read it. I am just in the beginning, but it breaks my heart, it breaks all my faith, that faith I lose like you and have been trying to build again and again and again. Thanks for being a testimony, thanks for being somebody in the middle of all still holding a light, it’s never easy, it’s something inside that always hurt. We, survivors know it so well, but we are with you in a way, in a way that can’t be described with words. . It hurts a bit more, but what else would we expect? Of course you needed to take all that anger out, and what in therapy was called “second wounding experience” for you as for the most of us, wasn’t good! And in the middle of all, I just can not stop admiring so deeply your soul, that part of you that never could be destroyed; we can see that beautiful soul of you emerging countless times. That’s the light you bring to us Joe. In the middle of all this pain that now I feel for all you went through, thanks, millions of thanks for your courage, for being a testimony of this hidden war against children. There is a long path in this society about awareness.

You just make me stronger inside, that strength that you know we many times feel like loosing!

Sending you all the survivor love possible,

Clau x

5.

Hey there, I just read your second book, it was just as powerful and gripping as the first one you wrote, as you know from my last communication Joe, I never knew what I was going to do after my A levels, since reading your books, its given me the inspiration to study clinical psychology and help children and even adults that are suffering or suffered from child abuse, this is the career path for me and this is because of you Joe and the way your books have inspired me so much, thanks again Joe, you really have made a massive impact on my life and really opened my eyes to what goes on behind closed doors, you are my hero and thank you for telling the world your story. These two books written will be the books to educate the world about the suffering of children.

The Foundation of Survivors – Plan. A (Mapping for a brighter future for children)

Hand Out

By Joe Peters

The Foundation of Survivors aims to inspire a culture in which, all children are valued, respectedand loved unconditionally.We Embrace the unique differences between individuals and aim to create an environment that Value and respect the talent and contribution of people from different backgrounds and heritage.

Diversity:-

We ensure our diversity principles are fully and equally delivering appropriate support and servicesthat suit the needs of the individuals from minority, disaffected or excluded communities and groups.

We ensure that all of our future publications and informative resources, including our website reflect the reality of diversity so that all our work is either mainstream or targeted services within reach of every individual in the United Kingdom, regardless of age, class, gender, disability, cultural identityor location.

Our Goals:-

To educate children in schools about child abuse and its effects

To promote awareness of child abuse and be openly discussed in school education

To table new strategies to deal with victims, within the education system and the communities

To work closely with school counsellors and Parent(s) or Guardians.

Develop an intense “Child Monitoring Response Programme”

Retention of abuse cases with counsellor support (throughout both childhood, adolescent and adult stages)

To terminate child abuse from progressing into paedophiliac, criminal and other inappropriate behaviour.

To ensure safety, welfare and sheltered accommodation in extreme cases

Set-up a safe haven for vulnerable victims and runaway children with full anonymity.

Freephone number, and remote assistance, where necessary.

Re-evaluate current guidelines and practices relating to Social Services and Government Policies.

To work with Police Officers and most importantly PCSO’s in the communities, to identity problem areas etc.

Police database to identity vulnerable young people abused in childhood, to identify and support victims from re-offending

Full support on child behaviour and any underlying problems within the family environment

More support and training services in Youth Areas, i.e youth centres

For the UK’s Children’s Act to be updated with the integration of C.M.P in the appropriate sectors.

To get Children’s charities to work together and share ideas and information.

NHS Trust (Medical G.P’s etc) to work and refer to CMP and have access to the database.

1) To educate children in schools about child abuse and its effects and to promote awareness of child abuse to be openly discussed in schooling education. To produce the Foundation’s own DVD-Based education material with online backup for kids that can review themselves or point to existing links to cover schools feeling constrained over time.

2 ) To bring new strategies to deal with victims of child abuse within the education sector, to identify the victims of child abuse and work closely with a school counsellor and the parent(s) or Guardian of the child.

2b ) To lobby government to force primary schools to maintain permanent records of school attendance, not just seven years.

3 ) To put in place an ongoing government “child monitoring programme” which will provide counselling & effective programme to follow up on cases of child abuse and continue the support through childhood and adulthood, with effective programme to stop child abuse from progressing into paedophilia behaviour, crime and other inappropriate behaviour.

4) To ensure the safety & welfare of the child and to give children a place of safety in case of severe child abuse. A secure and safe property for children to go too, when they are in danger of child abuse and feel they need to run away. (A safe haven for the child to have full anonymity rights too and once in this protected zone that abuser(s) have no access to the child). Law to be introduced to give legal guardianship to this protected zone team. (Please see 11).

5 ) A manageable telephone-based contact system to ring and be called back and a meeting arranged to be picked up by this charity and taken to the safe haven projects once established, which will accommodate and work with the child, making and reassuring the child is safe and working with the child protection team.

6 ) To have a shakeup of the current guidelines and practices of Social Services investigating child abuse and to allow social workers to do their job effectively without prejudices of these Guidelines or Practices, and allow social workers to give feedback to the CMP.

7 ) To work with authorities such as Police officers and PCSO’s in the communities to identify problems and give feedback to the child monitoring programme, which will follow up on the child’s behaviour and investigate underlining problems with the family household.

7b ) To work with the Association of Chief Police Officers and the ultimate overseer of the Sapphire teams as to the best way make it easier for victims to disclose and tackle abuse by official authority figures, not limited to the police.

8 ) Further aims to bring further training within other areas such as youth centres and for Youth Workers to understand Child abuse and its effects and to report anything suspicious in confidence to the dedicated “Child monitoring programme” (CMP)

9 ) For the UK’s Children’s Act to be updated with new laws and integrate the CMP within this area

10 ) To gather information regarding the effectiveness of the AMBER ALERT in America and consider its possible adoption by the United Kingdom (for missing child alert)

11) To open our first intensive care project centre, offering beds, intensive clinical psychology counselling and support for children, safe haven to be integrated with the CMP, help provide constant care and constant child monitoring throughout or as long as it takes for the child/young adult to recover from the abuse, to prevent and break the cycle of abuse of the child, so the child does not go on and commit crimes of a sexual nature.

12) To get a bill into parliament for the new laws to be passed ASAP.

13) To get this system set up in the United Kingdom and further countries to follow the same system

Suggestions’:-

We would like to prevent other young people going to London when they run away, so they cannot be preyed upon and risk further dangers, it would be easier picking them up before they specifically/officially run away and go missing. (Steps to be taken)

Our website will provide a free phone helpline once funding is available, with an online forum to an “Agony Uncle” and “Agony Aunt” that will be aimed at advice for child or adult, friends and relatives that have any suspicions of child abuse and danger. Further to this will also encourage too use and support this programme. We can then provide resources of contacts and phone numbers specific to

Areas. We will give support and a compassioned service and reply to all cases reported to use via e-mail. Correspondence to supportboth young children and survivors of childhood abuse and allow people to register and post in the forum, for online monitoring andmuch more….

Mandatory depo-provera jabs for paedophiles in the UK (chemical castration)

I haven’t wrote a entry for a while, hence my ill health I felt compelled to try and complete as many entries as I can, here is my new entry:-I recently came over a article relating to Depo-Provera Jabs for Paedophiles and more so a petition which can be signed here http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/childprotecter/ which I am personally backing myself, however do not feel obliged to sign the petition if you do not think its morally correct.

Sex offenders, such as rapists, paedophiles, and exhibitionists, are among the highest reoccurring offences UK. These offenders commit crimes that put fear into the general public and pose a threat to people that live in their neighbourhoods. These offenders should be punished and not let off or forgiven of their crime(s) just because they have gone through a treatment program, most or which cannot show a significant success rate.

Chemical castration is an ideal punishment for sex offenders and also a therapy treatment in my eyes. When Depo-Provera is administered, recidivism rates fall to 5%. Their sexual fantasies are lessened as a result of the reduction of testosterone levels. Although men administered this drug are capable of having sexual intercourse, many people argue that chemical castration is cruel and unusual punishment. This argument is countered by the fact that sex offenders are required to get injections only once a month. What is “cruel and unusual” is allowing sex offenders to attack innocent children or woman. This effective therapy will protect future victims. It is an “offender friendly” way of reducing sexual violence

A few US States, including California and Florida, permit convicted sex offenders to be injected with Depo Provera, an FDA-approved birth control drug. Often called “chemical castration,” Depo Provera is meant to quell the sex drive of male sex offenders by lowering their testosterone levels. The drug does not render any permanent physical change to the body. The treatment is believed to be most effective on sex offenders who possess uncontrollable biological urges that take the form of sexual fantasies that are usually only satisfied by acting on the fantasy.

Both the California and Florida statutes provide for mandatory injections for repeat sex offenders, as well as discretionary injections for first-time offenders. Despite the mandatory language in the Florida law, the law has apparently been invoked only a few times since its passage in 1997.

Critics, including the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), charge that chemical castration violates sex offenders’ constitutional rights. (I personally think this is ridiculous to say the least and any rights should be waved once they are convicted of sex crimes) The ACLU contends that chemical castration violates an offender’s implied right to privacy under the Fourteenth Amendment, rights of due process and equal protection, and the Eighth Amendment’s ban of cruel and unusual punishment.

Pursuant to a 1997 law, Texas permits surgical castration of offenders. By May 2005, three men had undergone the voluntary procedure. Candidates must be at least 21 years of age, have had at least two sex offence convictions, and have undergone at least 18 months of sex offender treatment, including Depo Provera injections, to understand how their bodies might react with less testosterone.

So I guess, the question is? Do you think the UK should adopt a new law for Depo Provera injections for paedophiles or any sex offender for that matter of fact.

In the US, a study run on paedophiles has proven that when a paedophile is administered with the Depo-provera injection it diminshes their “drive” and “urges” to perform their sickening acts upon children (this is the case with almost every paedophile once given the Depo-provera and has a 95% success rate)

The Depo-provera is widely available in the UK and is better known as the “contraceptive jab” which are given to women as a precaution for unwanted pregnancies. The Depo-provera is now regularly used on paedophiles in the US and has had extremely positive results. It is now a condition of their parole that they agree to this injection.

Chemical and physical castration are NOT the same. Physical castration involves the removal of the testicles, and although this can be very effective, it does not always achieve the results needed. Therefore, chemical castration is the preferred method and it is by far, the most effective.